“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Albert Einstein Aristotle described wisdom as the most finished form of knowledge. How does knowledge achieve this finished form? Brain research provides a clue. As brain cells...

Sue is excited to go to the cocktail party. She knows only a few others who will be attending, but she’s confident she’ll find some interesting people to talk to – she always does! Full of energy and confidence, she has a strong sense of connection with her...

Oh no! What a morning! The alarm didn’t go off. I stubbed my toe rushing to the shower, which was cold because that rotten kid used up all the hot water. Again. The coffee machine boiled over, leaving a scorched mess all over the heating plate and me without caffeine....

At the core of each of us are our values – important and enduring beliefs about what is important. Once ignited, our instinctive drives can sustain us when we need to set aside our most natural behavior, as shown in this TED video by Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The...

How do you take a bunch of ordinary kids, impair their performance and turn them into liars? Tell them they’re smart, that’s how. Praising children’s intelligence worsens both their motivation and their performance. So much for the self-esteem movement. Carol Dweck,...

Many of us grew up believing that our IQ was an important, and unchangeable, measure of our intelligence. When not provided with our scores directly, we inferred them from how we managed in school. If we sailed through, we were comfortable with the notion that we...